Fight the Whoosh

Breasts and Eggs, A Court of Silver Flames, Winter's Orbit, You People + Mahabharata for Children

February is (practically) over and as I type furiously to make sure this newsletter — it’s supposed to be monthly — marches into your inboxes before, well, March, all I can think of is Douglas Adams’s brilliant quote on deadlines (“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by”).

#FightTheWhoosh

In my defence, I haven’t been sleeping on the newsletter; at least not on the reading part. Allow me to share the list of books I’ve read this month: 

You People by Nikita Lalwani

Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami

Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell

The five books of the ACOTAR series by Sarah J. Maas

Mahabharata for Children by Arshia Sattar.

Thanks to my Maas marathon, I now know that I can read about 550 pages in a day and the notes I’ve made while reading offer evidence that around page 300, my little brain turns into a (magic?) mushroom.

Exhibit A: “So many shared themes between ACSF (A Court of Silver Flames, the most recent ACOTAR book) and Breasts and Eggs — both books are driven by a female narrator whose names begin with N; both have difficult sisters and great female friendships. Both also have a tall hero with ‘silky’ hair.” 

Surely it is but a minor detail that ACSF is set in the faerie land of Prythian and is about Nesta, a traumatised human who has been turned immortal, while Breasts and Eggs is about an author living her life in Tokyo and negotiating that complex thing called womanhood. Also, while we’re on this compare-and-contrast-trip, let’s not forget that the protagonist of Breasts and Eggs hates having sex while Nesta in ACSF is… the opposite.  

Now that my brain is (sort of) back to normal, I can confirm that one thing ACSF and Breasts and Eggs do have in common is their authors have dedicated fans. Maas is a bestselling author of fantasy fiction and thanks to my binge-reading, Google has done its bit to acquaint me with her fan following. Mieko Kawakami — who has a truly varied CV, having been (among other things) a hostess in a bar and a pop singer — is considered a feminist icon in Japan. She famously pointed out to Haruki Murakami that a lot of the women in his fiction “exist solely to fulfil a sexual function”. 

(Incidentally, Murakami has praised Kawakami’s writing. Good on him.)

Breasts and Eggs is divided into two books. In the first, Natsu, a struggling author in Tokyo, plays host to her sister Makiko and niece Midoriko, who come to visit from Osaka. Makiko has come to look up clinics where she can get breast augmentation done. Midoriko has stopped talking and communicates only through written notes. The second book jumps eight years in the future, when Natsu is moderately successful as an author but struggling to write her next book. After seeing a programme on sperm donation in Japan, she starts wondering what it would be like to be a mother.

While there’s plenty that’s weird in Breast and Eggs, there’s nothing exotic about either Natsu or the Tokyo that Kawakami shows us. Every now and then, dreams slip into the mundane reality of Natsu’s life, but that doesn’t take away from how credible and relatable everything feels in Breasts and Eggs. The everyday adventures that Natsu and the other women in the novel have are an exploration of what it means to be a woman in Japan. Reading Breasts and Eggs feels almost like idly wandering through a person’s memories. I enjoyed it immensely and I particularly love the way Kawakami ends the novel.    

Come to think of it — yes, my brain is having another mushroom moment — a lot of ACSF also explores femininity. Only Maas’s way of exploring these ideas are very different from Kawakami’s (obviously). I’m not very well-versed with contemporary fantasy fiction, but I think Nesta stands out not because she’s a woman protagonist, but because of the kind of personality she has. She’s an unlikable, sharp-tongued woman who is adept at building façades to hide how badly she’s hurting and prone to lashing out. This is the sort of character that traditionally would be the villain of the piece, but Nesta is very much a hero.  

ACSF is at its worst if you’re looking for plotting and at its best when Maas is writing about Nesta’s depression. There are some wonderful female characters and friendships, which is a rare thing in popular fiction. Also, I’m quite fascinated by the way women deal with power and being powerful in the ACOTAR world. A lot of them are stripped of their magical powers or choose to give them up, but this doesn’t reduce their stature or influence, which is interesting. 

Also, young adult (YA) fiction is a whole lot more graphic than I imagined it to be. ACSF is proudly A-rated and arguably, that’s as much because of the many sex scenes as for the themes of  violence and abuse that the novel touches upon. However, the previous books were supposed to be YA and if you ask me, they’re more A and less Y. For example, A Court of Wings and Fury has a couple having sex pretty much in a blood-soaked battlefield. 

It was a bit of a transition to read about Maas’s hulking men whose body parts are regularly straining certain items of clothing because just before starting ACOTAR, I’d been reading Winter’s Orbit, in which the most explicit detail we get is a kiss that makes the involved parties’ skin tingle. Maxwell’s gentle romance has a lot of familiar tropes — a playboy prince, an arranged marriage, misunderstandings, stolen glances — but in a less familiar setting. 

This novel is set in a galaxy far, far away, in the Empire of Iskat and the lead pair are two men. I’m not particularly interested in space operas, but Maxwell’s worldbuilding drew me in. I loved how she laid out the politics between the planets in the empire and little details like how the animals and birds on Iskat are sharply different from what we know. The kingfisher on Iskat, for instance, is a venomous bird with a two-metre wingspan that has been culled into extinction because “bioengineers didn’t realise their prey instinct would include humans”. Bears are reptilian, aggressive and have no fur. It’s almost as though someone took the words from Earth and forced them to fit (however awkwardly) this new planet and its wildlife. Unfortunately, the worldbuilding is also one of the book’s weaker aspects because Maxwell doesn’t explain some rather important details, like the Remnants (what are they and why are only some people affected by them?). I felt like I was reading the middle book in a trilogy set in the Iskat empire when as far as I know, Winter’s Orbit is a standalone.  

Still, there’s a lot to enjoy in Maxwell’s novel, provided phrases like “space opera” and “gay romance” don’t make you roll your eyes. Kiem, the playboy prince, is a sweetheart and he’s funny, which you realise in the very first chapter when we learn about his scandal-rich past and he learns that he has to marry Jainan because imperial politics demand it. Winter’s Orbit also has a portrait of a marriage that seems to be perfect but is actually abusive, which makes you treasure the sweetness of Kiem and Jainan’s relationship all the more. As if all this wasn’t enough, there’s also a murder to solve and someone wants to unleash war and mayhem upon the Empire. It’s a lot to balance and Maxwell does a very good job of it. I just wish she’d given Kiem and Jainan a little more time to nuzzle. 

Back on planet earth, Nikita Lalwani’s You People is set in London, where a mysterious chap named Tuli runs an Italian restaurant that has one curious feature: most of its staff are illegal immigrants. The novel follows Shan, who is from Sri Lanka and looking for his family; and Nia, a Welsh-Indian teenager who can ‘pass’ for white and has run away from her addict mother. It soon becomes evident that Tuli’s restaurant is like a safe house for asylum seekers and his methods aren’t strictly legal. The central question that You People puts before the reader is this: “is it better to tell all of the truth, one hundred percent, and get deported, or is it better to tell mostly the truth, with a few untruths, and become legal?”

The tension in You People builds slowly as we follow Shan and Nia, both of whom are painfully solitary and trying to avoid their past. Despite occasionally giving in to purple prose, for most part, Lalwani paints an evocative portrait of a diverse, cosmopolitan and unprivileged London. All the episodes set in the restaurant work beautifully, particularly the scenes with the immigrant cooks and the raid in which one of the staff are taken by the authorities. You People might have felt more real and visceral had Lalwani’s prose not been so determinedly lyrical, but that could be my general scepticism of poetic prose.

It’s hard to make a novel about political refugees and mixed race identity a feelgood affair, but Lalwani tries her damnedest. I can’t say I was entirely convinced by the ending, but I did like the London of immigrants that she’s recreated in You People. Even though there have been some fantastic portraits of London’s diversity — plays like My Beautiful Launderette; the poetry of people like Linton Kwesi Johnson; novels like Brick Lane and A Concise Chinese-English History for Lovers etc etc — we still tend to think of it as a white town. You People is yet another reminder that London is a city of immigrants.

Which brings me to the last book in my ‘read’ pile: Mahabharata for Children. There are two biases that I need to admit to at the outset. First, I am in complete awe of Arshia Sattar, who is perhaps my favourite translator of the Ramayana and whose insights into Sanskrit texts are phenomenal. Second, I don’t think the Mahabharata is a text that is meant for children and I think this version proves my point because in an effort to be kid-friendly, this retelling feels like it’s been dumbed down.

To my mind, the Mahabharata is an adult text not just because it’s graphic — which it is. So much sex and violence *wipes sweat off brow* — but because the subjects it explores are complex. The best known stories from the Mahabharata talk about (among other things) dynastic politics, caste discrimination, privilege, sexism and, of course, the cost of war. One of the reasons I find the original text special is that it reveals layers depending upon the reader’s context. For instance, living as we do in a time defined by man-made climate catastrophe, it feels poignant that the story begins with a failed marriage between a river goddess and a human king, and then escalates to so many stories of people savaging nature (eg. the snake sacrifice and the burning of the forest to create Indraprastha) and ends with at least one tale of nature striking back (the reeds that kill the Yadav clans). 

The difficulty of the Mahabharata is that it isn’t a simple prescriptive text that tells you ‘Y is bad’ and ‘X is good’. It’s a messy, sprawling text that expects a reader to connect seemingly disconnected stories in order to appreciate how cause and effect are rarely linear. To my mind, the only way a text like this can be simplified to “kid-friendly” is if it is accompanied by commentary that points out the nuances embedded in the telling. Mahabharat for Children doesn’t do that. It’s attempting to be a neutral retelling (relying perhaps on the adults accompanying the child reader to provide the commentary?), which only serves to make the text feel thin and reductive. 

There’s also the question of what we mean by “children”. Four-year-olds? Ten-year-olds? Sixteen-year-olds? It felt to me like Mahabharata for Children had imagined children to be one homogenous bunch of oompa loompas who are unaware of the world and society in which they live. In order to maintain their innocence, the original epic is sanitised and that leads to some truly perplexing editorial calls. For instance, who is this child that can’t be told about consensual sex like Pandu and Madri have in the forest, but can be told about the attempted rape that is Draupadi’s vastraharan? Why is Vyasa being Vidura’s father removed from this retelling? Why is Shikhandi a girl rather than gender fluid? If there’s one thing we know, it is that children’s fiction doesn’t have to simplistic. Just look at how Rick Riordan has explored ideas like gender and race in his books, which are also based on mythology. 

There are some lovely bits of prose in Mahabharata for Children and I wish Sattar’s excellent note at the end of the book had been longer, but on the whole, I found this book frustrating. Aside from the erasures in the text, there’s something strangely dispassionate about the retelling and as a result, I felt nothing even while reading parts that I know are heartrending (like the killing of Abhimanyu. Just thinking of that teenaged boy being butchered by his uncles as he makes a desperate, futile last stand makes me swallow the knot of sadness at my throat, but I think BR Chopra’s Mahabharata teleserial did a better job of conveying the tragedy of that gruesome moment than this book). Also, while Sonali Zohra’s illustrations are pretty enough, they convey so little of the emotions in the scenes they’re depicting. Take, for example, this image, which shows a forest fire. 

Compare it to this image, also of a forest fire. 

The colours in the second — which is from P.S. What’s Up With the Climate? coming out as a book soon and is highly recommended — as well as the angles that are created by the silhouettes lend an intensity and urgency to the scene, which are missing from the first.    

I’m writing this on a day that began with laughter and hope, but has quickly descended into worry and anxiety as bad news has come in from many different fronts. People I care about are dealing with uncertainties and misfortunes that have, as always, slammed into them without warning. What I would like to do is wave a magic wand and fix everything, but I’m reminded that this rarely works out, even in the magical world of texts like the Mahabharata. 

If you feel inclined, say a prayer for those who need it and if you’re in a dark place, I hope that you will find a ray of light from which you can draw strength. 

Take care, stay well and Dear Reader will be back soon.