Eleanor Oliphant + Qandeel Baloch + MF Husain and more

Right, part two of what I promised here with one ‘bonus’ book.

Confession: there are two literary prizes that I do remember to look out for – the Booker and the Nobel. Everything else, I have EVERY intention of reading the winners or keeping track of them, but since I haven’t managed in the past couple of decades, I’m not expecting improvement on that front. So basically, I completely missed that Gail Honeyman had won the Costa First Novel Award last year and that she’s been described as one of the most promising debut novelists by a bushel load of critics in England.

The down side of this is that had it not been for a friend gifting me the book, I’d never have thought to even look for it. The up side, I cracked open Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine (Harper Collins) without knowing anything about it. Next thing I knew it was 3am. When I went to work, it was with my nose in the book. I literally hid behind my monitor so that no one would notice I was effectively bunking work while actually sitting at my desk. And entirely too soon, it was over. The last time I tore through a book like this was Em and the Big Hoom, which coincidentally is also about a woman with an exquisite sense of humour, who spent a lot of time at home and was grappling with psychological issues.

If you haven’t read Jerry Pinto’s Em and the Big Hoom (Aleph), there’s a beautiful paperback version out. Don’t miss the pages with stained purple edges.

But I digress. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely is the story of Eleanor Oliphant, perhaps the most charming heroine to have entered our world. If Honeyman can write a few more ladies like this one, she’ll be the Jane Austen of our time. Because here, finally, is a woman of our times – lonely, vulnerable, witty, curious, strong, independent. Hell, she (eventually) even has a therapist. On the face of it, the novel has the plot of a standard romance. Eleanor lives a routine life and is committed to blending in with the wallpaper as far as possible. Then one day, she falls in love and decides it’s time for a makeover. We as readers know that there isn’t a chance in hell of Eleanor and her Prince Charming getting together. Aside from the fact that their worlds don’t quite collide — she works as admin in a graphic design firm and he’s a petulant wannabe pop star who spends a lot of time on Twitter — we know Eleanor deserves better. Fortunately, there is Someone, provided Eleanor notices him and he falls for Eleanor. Minor details, right?

Honeyman uses this classic paperback romance plot to explore loneliness and overcoming trauma. Her first-person narration makes the reader something like her nightly journal and it’s impossible not to love her. Honeyman drops hints about her heroine, like a fairy tale breadcrumb trail. There are throwaway statements about her face being partially disfigured by burn scars, social workers dropping in, an abusive mother, the absence of friends, her unfamiliarity with standard things that everyone’s seen on TV or done with their family – details that make your skin prickle.

At one level, the reason Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine inspires frenzied reading is that you want to know exactly what happened to her in the past. I’m not going to give any spoilers, but let’s just say that revelation is not the book’s finest moment. The past, despite its terrors, is actually not the most compelling aspect of Eleanor. For me, the reveals — particularly the one about the conversations with her mother — were disappointing.

While the curiosity about what happened to Eleanor may be the reason you decide to not abandon the book initially, the reason you keep reading is the voice Honeyman has crafted for Eleanor. I also love the fact that her name is Oliphant because had anyone else been the narrator of this novel, Oliphant’s oddness would be the elephant in the room. Thanks to Eleanor being the narrator, everything is addressed, and with wry humour.

Despite the fact that Eleanor’s childhood experiences may not be standard, chances are you’ve felt a little of the outsider syndrome and depression that Eleanor battles on an everyday basis. That strange combination of embarrassment, anxiety and anger when you know people are talking about you, and not in a complimentary way. The joy of sitting in a salon, being fussed over and finally looking in the mirror to see a shinier version of yourself. That sense of discomfort and confusion when you can’t quite figure out where you fit into a social jigsaw puzzle.

When we read about things like loneliness and depression, more often than not, the prose is dense with poetry and lyricism. It’s serious, heavy stuff. A great example is The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, by Olivia Laing, which is one of the most beautiful, poetic books I’ve read in ages. Honeyman uses a bit from it for her epigraph. But as gorgeous as Laing’s prose might be, her memoir about recovering from heartbreak by immersing herself in solitude, art and New York City is one that you read slowly. It’s a book that you linger over, rather than race through. Honeyman’s prose, in contrast, has a little fizz in it. Even at its saddest, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is sparkling and fluent.

While it’s not the best part of the novel, I’m happy to report Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine ended with hope rather than heartbreak. Some parts feel rushed, others feel a little clumsily patched together, but these are minor quibbles. Because when you close the book, you realise Eleanor Oliphant really is completely and totally fine. Amen sister.

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From a fictional woman who survived darkness to a real woman who didn’t. The Sensational Life & Death of Qandeel Baloch by Sanam Maher is a book that needs a little bit of context for readers like me who don’t about Qandeel Baloch. I only heard of Baloch when she was killed and until then, I had no idea that she was Pakistan’s first social media celebrity. I didn’t know that her name was like a bad word and that she evoked a crazy mix of distaste and awe for the provocative videos she posted online. For that matter, I didn’t even know what kind of videos she posted online.

Someone told me that the aura of Qandeel Baloch is such that in Pakistan, bookstores won’t stock it openly and if you ask for it, some will sneak it out like it’s a contraband. That’s mad.

If you know as little about Quandeel Baloch as I did, then it’ll take a little bit of extra reading for you to realise that Maher isn’t making a big deal about a sideshow.

As Maher discovers, Qandeel Baloch was a cipher. That wasn’t her given name, but one she chose for herself when she crafted a new identity, a new persona, having shed the skin of an abusive marriage and her rural, small-town past. Baloch would mean different things to different people. For the media, she was an easy way to grab eyeballs because she knew how to perform and was eager for publicity. For aspiring models and many young women, she became a patron saint of sorts, encouraging them to be ambitious, body confident and independent. For her brothers, she was a source of shame. For her parents, she was a source of pride. Some remembered her as a fighter. Others knew her as a sex object. Maher finds people who can talk about all these facets. There are countless videos on YouTube that show Baloch the performer and it’s nauseatingly easy to find pictures of Baloch’s corpse.

And yet when it comes to figuring who Baloch really was and what happened to her, there’s very little by way of concrete, substantiated fact. Maher makes this quite clear in her introduction when she tells the reader that the established facts about Baloch are few and far between. There are more questions than there are answers and it’s easy to imagine Baloch’s words echoing in Maher’s head as she tries to dismantle the persona and find the woman behind it. When she isn’t able to, Maher holds on to Baloch’s words and makes the dead woman a starting point for an examination of South Asian misogyny.

Maher is a fine reporter and writer. Baloch was a fascinating personality and some of the book’s most poignant and insightful moments happen when Maher is on the trail to find out the truth about Baloch — who was she, what happened to her, what were the relationships that anchored her, who hated her, whom did she love. In the course of this exploration, Maher brings us face to face with Mufti Qavi, who seems innocuous at first only to become something more cold, slippery and villainous.

For me, what was uncomfortable and dissatisfying about The Sensational Life and Death of Qandeel Baloch is that, despite its title, chunks of the book aren’t about her. It’s one thing to spend time on people like Malik Azam, a journalist who ‘broke’ the story that Baloch was not the city slicker she pretended to be, but from the small town of Shah Sadar Din. At least he belongs in Baloch’s life. I struggled with the amount of attention paid to the pimp-y model coordinators, but it didn’t feel entirely unjustified since there was a tangential connection to Baloch’s life (she was a model).

But the pages and chapters spent on other social media celebrities (like the blue-eyed chaiwala whose photo went viral and the guy who cuts hair by setting it aflame) or even Nighat Dad, founder of the advocacy organization Digital Rights Foundation, felt uncomfortable. Dad sounds like a rock star and I hope lots of people write about her and support her efforts to help women against blackmail, cyberstalking etc. But these people and their lives felt vaguely like flashy patchwork that was meant to distract you from the thinness of Baloch’s story.

Maher’s point is that these other people are subjects who help throw light upon the culture in Pakistan — the culture that played a critical role in making Baloch a star as well as a target. This is a valid argument, but Maher’s detours into Dad’s work and the lives of other social media celebrities didn’t help tighten the lens upon Baloch. To tie together a new phenomenon like the internet, smart phones and social media with generations-old violent misogyny is difficult. Maher struggles with this, but valiantly. Frequently as I read about people who didn’t have any connection to Baloch, it felt as though she was meandering away from the woman after whom the book is named. This doesn’t mean that these parts are badly written. They’re not. They’re full of insight and perspective and are excellent, independent essays. It’s just that to me, they felt like diversions away from Baloch and her story, particularly since a fair amount of time is spent emphasising how Baloch wasn’t precisely typical.

The Sensational Life & Death of Qandeel Baloch is good and if its title was different, I would have liked the book better. As Maher details, Baloch had been used by the media repeatedly when she was alive and now in her death, it felt a little like she was being used again. Maher’s book is about internet culture in contemporary Pakistan and the way women are both empowered and threatened by the internet. Baloch is a part of this larger jigsaw that Maher is able to piece together, but not completely. Sure, the charisma of Baloch’s persona is being used for worthy cause – to come face to face with the ugly, violent, cloying misogyny that sticks to Pakistani society – but it’s still being used.

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I chanced upon Ila Pal’s (no relation) Husain: Portrait of An Artist at the airport recently and felt like an idiot for not knowing the book even existed. I mean, I read books, I’ve written about Indian art for years; hell, I’ve even interviewed MF Husain — you’d think I’d know about this book. Hadn’t even got an email about it.

Once I started reading it, I understood why. Husain: Portrait of an Artist is not a good book. It’s frustrating if you’re expecting a regular biography because it feels like a random set of diary entries bound together haphazardly. Why must a journal entry from 11 January 1989 come after the 22 March 1989 entry is a mystery to me, for instance. (This determined rejection of a recognisable timeline is one of the most annoying parts of this book.)

Especially for a country that doesn’t have the good fortune of having a museum where you can piece together a sort of timeline for modern and contemporary Indian art, it’s essential that a biography of someone like Husain have a sense of chronology. You need to know what he was painting in the ’40s, and how it changed in the ’60s, to the different things he tried in the ‘’80s and ‘’90s etc. This probably doesn’t seem necessary to Pal because she knew him and has obviously followed his work, but it’s impossible for someone who isn’t a dedicated fan of Husain’s to really understand the artist’s evolution.

Then there are the gushy bits. Pal has been a wide-eyed disciple and then a friend of the legendary artist, which means she feels a sense of intimacy with Husain. Often, Pal’s praise for Husain feels like food cooked with too many spices and too much ghee – striving for a certain quality of richness, but succeeding only in communicating excess. Initially, it also feels like she’s completely incapable of criticising Husain, though that isn’t true. She’s quite blunt about her disapproval of certain aspects of his personality and she questions Husain both directly and through her writing.

Finally, there are the pages that are devoted to telling us what Pal thinks of Husain, his work and the reactions he garnered at different points in his life. Some of this is interesting. A lot of it feels repetitive.

So yeah, as a book, this is not what I’d describe as good and yet it is enriching. Pal had access to Husain – which means the book has his words and his memories (dubious as they may be). You can hear Husain in Pal’s book, and that’s often fascinating, like when he talks about how the motifs connect in a painting or the kind of persona he creates for himself and why. There are details, like reproductions of letters Husain wrote, which are extraordinarily precious because there are so few records of this kind available to us. (Husain’s letters have doodles and sketches. They’re quite, quite lovely.) As a culture we haven’t paid much attention to archiving and so many stories are lost to us when these people die.

Pal doesn’t try to pretend she was close to Husain when she wasn’t. She chooses to talk about some relationships and some periods of his life in greater detail than others. In her introduction, she tells you she’s censored things he told her on record because that’s what she felt would be the responsible thing for her to do as a chronicler. She says without any qualms that she’s biased in favour of Husain, no matter how much he infuriated or disappointed her. There’s an artlessness about Pal the narrator that is occasionally frustrating, but mostly endearing.

Husain: Portrait of an Artist is worth having on your bookshelf for the memories contained in it, especially if you’ve liked any of his paintings. Reading Pal’s book, I realised just how much of a chronicler Husain had been. People mocked him for rushing to make a painting as a response to anything that happened in the country, from Emergency to the success of Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! But if someone ever is able to put together even photographs of each painting Husain made, and arrange them chronologically, just imagine what a record of events we’ll have. And of course most of these paintings are in collections abroad.

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And with that you’re all caught up with what I’ve read of late.

For your online reading pleasure, take a look at this lovely article (with gorgeous paintings. They're range from little bit to very erotic. You have been warned) about the beloved in Urdu ghazals and the space for queerness within this tradition.

Thank you for reading and Dear Reader will be back soon.