Heart Lamp and More...

I read four books shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, which means you get a newsletter

If you go to the website of the Booker Prizes, some clicking will take you to the page that announces the winner of this year’s International Booker Prize: Heart Lamp, by author Banu Mushtaq and author Deep Bhasthi.

That’s not a typo, by the way. Not on my part at least. However, “Deep” is/ was a typo by the people responsible for the Booker Prizes website. I know it’s not intentional and we all make typos, but to misspell the translator’s name on a page announcing “the world’s most influential award for translated fiction” is a tiny indicator of just how amazing a feat it is for Heart Lamp to have won this prize.

While the English have a long tradition of condescending to Indians (among others. All thanks to Britannia at one point ruling the waves etc), we live in hope that this colonial baggage is being unpacked with every passing day and with every book like Heart Lamp that wins international recognition. For one of the winners’ names to not just be incorrectly spelled, but remain uncorrected for days is embarrassing for the Booker Prizes, but makes Heart Lamp’s win feel sweeter to my postcolonial heart. You may not care to spellcheck our names, but we’re still taking the prize money. Cheers and thanks!

Screenshot taken on May 27, around 7am.

Within two days of the International Booker Prize being announced and Banu Mushtaq’s entirely wonderful speech — one of the most heart-delighting bits of the video is right in the beginning, when Banu Mushtaq is cocooned in a group hug that shimmers and sparkles with silk, sequins and friendship — I had four people ask me careful questions about the book. “What did you think of Heart Lamp?” asked one person. “I wonder, was Heart Lamp your favourite of the shortlist?” asked someone else. “Have you seen the reviews for Heart Lamp? Justified?” said another and finally, my favourite: “Did this one deserve to win?”

“Deserve” is such a loaded word, one that is invariably glazed with jus de sour grapes. In the context of prizes, it’s generally used by those who think they are either better than the prizewinner or know better than the jury. (I know I’m guilty of the latter all the damn time. My impostor syndrome will go into overdrive when it comes to reading a sentence I’ve written, but if a book or film I don’t like wins an award, I have no hesitation in declaring the jury is either spineless as a tapeworm or made up of fools.) The question of whether a prizewinner is ‘deserving’ comes from having inherited generations of stories about how better-qualified candidates were sidelined by formalities, politics and/or prejudice. Yet it’s worth remembering that sometimes, the loopholes can help the deserving. Remember how Percival Everett’s James won the Pulitzer? If no, here’s a quick recap from the New York Times (the link takes you to an article that should explain why I’m not inclined to drive even the teensiest bit of traffic to the NYT):

But it turns out that “James” was not the top pick among the Pulitzer’s five fiction jury members. It wasn’t even in the top three, according to three people with knowledge of the process, who were not authorized to speak about the confidential deliberations.

In a surprising twist, the prize went to Everett after the Pulitzer committee’s board failed to reach a consensus on the three finalists that the fiction jury initially presented — Rita Bullwinkel’s “Headshot,” Stacey Levine’s “Mice 1961,” and Gayl Jones’s “The Unicorn Woman.”

But I digress. I was talking about gatekeepers juries and their mandate to anoint the most worthy as prizewinner. Another reason we’re cynical about prizes is the conviction that winners are chosen less for their ability and more because their identity or work serves an agenda. This is often true and let’s not be under any misconception that there is either a universal best or that juries can do no wrong. However, while we’re at it, let’s also not lose sight of the detail that not all agenda are necessarily bad. For instance, if Heart Lamp won because this year’s jury wanted to shine the spotlight on marginalised voices, is that really a bad thing?

Heart Lamp is an important work in Indian literature because of the world in which Banu Mushtaq sets her stories and the challenges that Deepa Bhasthi navigated while translating the short stories from Kannada. These are stories written about and for women, with the author turning her back on the dominant, masculine perspective that has been held up as literary. Mushtaq’s characters in Heart Lamp are often unabashedly sentimental and dramatic, wailing at the world that restrains them, and also challenging what is considered respectable (especially in the elevated echelons of Kannada literature). Heart Lamp is important for the conversations it can inspire, which may in turn help to open up publishing to new voices and make some readers more aware of the world beyond their bubble.

In the Indian context, Heart Lamp reminds us that patriarchy cuts across religious boundaries. Islam may accord a wealth of respect to women, but in a culture that forces women to be a diminished version of themselves and values femininity only for its son-birthing biology, its followers submit to patriarchy first and then Islam. Mushtaq takes a hammer to the idea that Muslim communities take care of their own, emphasising instead the class and gender divides that keep social hierarchies in place. This is the India that the West is used to seeing — poor, backward, alternating between villainy and golden-hearted innocence, and blitzed with misfortune — but it’s also a look at the social inequalities that India’s elite and middle classes do their best to ignore.

All of this makes Heart Lamp culturally relevant in our present and Banu Mushtaq, an important writer. However, it doesn’t necessarily make Heart Lamp the most compelling read. This is a volume that doesn’t draw you in as much as guilt you into finishing it. The short stories are selected from Mushtaq’s writing across decades, but the selection feels monotonous rather than diverse. The stylish prose that Mushtaq served with that one unforgettable sentence in her Booker acceptance speech (“This moment feels like a thousand fireflies lighting a single sky — brief, brilliant and utterly collective”) is barely present in the stories of Heart Lamp. They follow predictable arcs and are populated by characters who become a sad, unidimensional blur. While there are images and moments that stayed with me for the abject misery they embodied, most of Heart Lamp felt overwrought, with too little subtlety and too much sentimentality. From time to time, I had to remind myself that this wasn’t simple fiction, but stories drawn from the non-fictional experiences and longings of very real women.

For me, the best part of Heart Lamp is the translator’s note, titled “Against Italics”, which should be essential reading for Indian anglophone writers. Even if you think in English, as someone whose heritage includes other Indian languages, there is some kind of translation you do each time you write. The polyphony we have in our heads by virtue of being multilingual can’t not impact our English and the rhythms of our prose and poetry. At least, I hope it does. Without that, without an ear for the nuances that Bhasthi writes about in her note, we’re less Indian writers in English and more just trying to pass off an imposed foreign language as our own.

I haven’t read all of the books shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, but of the four I did read, the one that dazzled me most was Under the Eye of the Big Bird, a weird and brilliant set of interconnected stories by Hiromi Kawakami (translated by Asa Yoneda). I loved everything about this bewildering book, which felt dreamlike for the way it would pull me into its alternative reality within seconds. So long as I was reading, everything made sense. The moment I surfaced out of the story, most of the coherence seemed to fade away — until the end. Under the Eye of the Big Bird is one of those rare books that I re-read immediately after finishing the first read because once the pieces of the story’s jigsaw puzzle finally fell into place, I wanted to go back to savour Kawakami’s storytelling, free of the distracting need to make sense of this eerie world with its mutant humans, sentient trees and other curiosities. One of the book’s most fascinating meditations is upon the idea of motherhood and the role of the mother figure.

Set in an unspecified future, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is a deliberately confusing chronicle about the last ditch attempt by humans to survive when faced with a very real possibility of going extinct. Kawakami wants us to think about a world order that is maintained by artificial intelligence, and what that might mean for humanity. There’s nothing predictable about Under the Eye of the Big Bird, and even when the world starts to feel familiar, the characters in the stories kept surprising me. Kawakami’s prose is elegant and spare, slowly revealing to the reader the beauty and horror of this near-apocalyptic world. Considering how snooty the literary fiction establishment can be, it’s a miracle this speculative science fiction work made it as far as the final shortlist. I will absolutely be looking up every darn thing by Kawakami that I can get my paws on (RIP what’s left of my bank account).

My other favourite from this year’s shortlist was A Leopard Skin Hat, by Anne Serre (translated by Mark Hutchinson) (fair warning: I almost fainted when I saw the price because the book is 50-odd pages long). Written as a memorial to Serre’s sister who died by suicide, A Leopard Skin Hat reduced me to a sniffling puddle. The book is a journey through memories and our guide is the nameless Narrator (who seems to be a stand-in for Serre although he’s masculine in the book). He’s the storyteller and a long-standing friend of Fanny, the troubled one who endured and endured until it was time for her to ascend. The shadow of Fanny’s death haunts both the novella and the Narrator as he looks back and lovingly recalls painful and beloved details of their friendship. You could finish Serre’s book in a day if you really wanted to streak through it, but I spent days over A Leopard Skin Hat, lingering over turns of phrase and marvelling at how perfectly she was able to capture complicated, shifty emotions into words that in a lesser narrator’s hands would feel flimsy and inadequate.

Presumably because it isn’t enough for Serre to reduce her reader to emotional mush, she’s also playing around with form and structural conventions in A Leopard Skin Hat. The book bounces between tenses (a particularly delicious and disruptive idea when you keep in mind how obsessed French is with its tenses), shifting from one to another with elegant, manic carelessness. It brings home how Fanny’s mind may have moved, but also suggests that in the Narrator’s mind, Fanny occupies both the past and the present. Similarly, the omniscient narrator shape-shifts into a first-person narrator, only to slip back into the third person again. And it’s done smoothly enough for even a pedantic grump like me to not feel irked by the shifts. A Leopard Skin Hat is a portrait of madness and a paean to friendship, both of which allow Serre to show just how sophisticated she is as a storyteller. Yet at the heart of the book isn’t its technical finesse or experimental flair, but the gleaming, adamantine sadness of someone grieving for one whom they loved deeply, but still may have failed.

So that’s three out of the four books I’ve read from the International Booker Prize’s shortlist. The fourth is Perfection, which I’d written about over here.

(Wow! Two newsletters in a month! Who am I even!)

With that, I will bid you farewell and return to real life. Let’s hope the Booker website corrects its typo soon. Thank you for reading and Dear Reader will be back soon.