Kiran Nagarkar's Jasoda + new books from Zubaan, Tara Books
In Dear Reader, I tell you what I’ve been reading and compile lists of new books expected/ out this month in India. I've been in touch with most of the big and indie Indian publishers to ask for their releases. Some are more responsive than others (sigh). If you have a book that you'd like me to list, please get in touch via Twitter (@dpanjana) or my website. If you've got suggestions for the newsletter, they're most welcome too.
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I still haven’t finished The Book of Chocolate Saints by Jeet Thayil. This is a proudly, densely literary book. It’s also 500 pages and each of these pages take time. You have to go through the sentences carefully, slowly, savouring them. They’re often exquisitely constructed and make you marvel at how much artistry can be filigreed into simple words and fragments. All the while keeping your fingers crossed that when you reach page 498, you will not feel like the book was an exhibition of flair, wit and poetry, without plot and with shades of self-indulgence.
By ‘you’ I mean ‘I’. Which reminds me of this fantastic essay on “monstrous men and female finishers” by Claire Dederer in The Paris Review. She's really in her element when she discusses what’s seen as monstrous in women writers: the act of finishing. This is because finishing something demands selfishness and women are meant to be selfless, not selfish. They have families to take care of, relationships to nurture and kindnesses to perform. To finish writing something is to chip at the selflessness that’s like plaster, lending femininity its smooth, pure finish. “Things have to get broken for the book to get written.”
As someone who’s written one book, is in the process of completing line edits for another while starting a third, Dederer’s observation hit home. Because it’s true. Dederer’s focus — probably because she is a mother — is on how the female finisher is considered monstrous because she abandons her children temporarily, but take it from me, even if you don’t have kids or even a partner, things still have to get broken.
Speaking of monstrous women, what I did finish at practically one go is Kiran Nagarkar’s new novel Jasoda (Harper Collins India, Rs 599). It’s about a woman named Jasoda and her family’s odyssey through drought, Mumbai and whirpools of human greed. The first (and strongest) parts are set in a state called Paar — “'Beyond — that's what the word 'paar' meant. Beyond what? The answer is still 'Beyond'. Beyond the farthest limits of your imagination. Beyond civilization.” Nagarkar plays around with the meanings of Hindi words throughout the book, relying heavily on the fact that our names have recognisable meanings attached to them. Most characters live up to their names. Himmat is indeed the embodiment of courage and hope. Sangram, which means combat, is indeed waging a war. Pawan is as swift and unpredictable as the wind. I can just imagine the wicked glint in Nagarkar’s eye when he decided to name Jasoda’s last son Kishen.
The novel opens with Jasoda giving birth to a baby girl whom she immediately kills. So much for the aura of warm, fuzzy maternity that the name Jasoda radiates, courtesy the Bhagvata Purana. Then again, the mythical Jasoda’s world was her son, and the same is true for this 21st century Jasoda who adores her boys.
From Paar, Jasoda and her brood move to Mumbai, facing a fresh set of cruelties but also discovering a certain humanity that’s missing in their drought-struck village. In both places, however, Jasoda remains out of place and out of sync. The only thing Jasoda has more of than monsters is clichés — the philanthropic Parsi, the degenerate Rajput, the Fagin-like street lord — but Nagarkar is one of those authors who can use them in a way that the characters feel familiar instead of hackneyed. Once Jasoda and gang leave Mumbai, the novel felt a bit rushed and the final twists in the tale weren't as punishing as I’d hoped because Nagarkar was racing towards the last sentence.
While Cuckold will probably always be my favourite Kiran Nagarkar novel, Jasoda is the one that’s going to make me grin stupidly till the end of days. Because it lets me claim something that I honestly never imagined I’d be able to say — that Nagarkar and I have something in common as writers. But we do! We’ve both written books about women who are female finishers of a monstrous variety. At one point in Nagarkar’s novel, Jasoda delivers a baby girl to a woman in Mumbai. She’s ready to kill the infant, but the mother says she wants to keep her. This confirms to Jasoda that she’s left Paar behind and is in “another country”. Except she’s not. If she were, then female foeticide would not be a persistent problem and I wouldn’t have the plot for a novel that’s coming out (hopefully) in March 2018.
Geek warning: I enjoyed this essay on classicist Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey so, so much. Wilson is the first woman to translate Homer’s epic and it’s all sorts of fantastic how being alert to gender and misogyny can transform a text. Look out for the nuance that Wilson notices and adds to the slave girls whom Telemachus kills. I am now convinced that I need this translation in my life.
Finally, during an interview I was doing for an article, this poem of Sylvia Plath’s came up. It’s got some haunting imagery and that erratic but rhythmic pulse… there’s a lot to be said for female finishers. “The heart has not stopped.”
Mystic
The air is a mill of hooks -
Questions without answer,
Glittering and drunk as flies
Whose kiss stings unbearably
In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.
I remember
The dead smell of sun on wood cabins,
The stiffness of sails, the long salt winding sheets.
Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?
Once one has been seized up
Without a part left over,
Not a toe, not a finger, and used,
Used utterly, in the sun’s conflagrations, the stains
That lengthen from ancient cathedrals
What is the remedy?
The pill of the Communion tablet,
The walking beside still water? Memory?
Or picking up the bright pieces
of Christ in the faces of rodents,
The tame flower- nibblers, the ones
Whose hopes are so low they are comfortable -
The humpback in his small, washed cottage
Under the spokes of the clematis.
Is there no great love, only tenderness?
Does the sea
Remember the walker upon it?
Meaning leaks from the molecules.
The chimneys of the city breathe, the window sweats,
The children leap in their cots.
The sun blooms, it is a geranium.
The heart has not stopped.
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NOVEMBER RELEASES
I’ve already shared most the listings that I was able to gather for November, so I’m afraid there isn’t much that I can alert you to this time. That’s why I’ve added that beautiful illustration by Ayangbe Mannen, because you know, a picture’s worth a thousand words apparently. (I live in hope that the publishers who don’t read emails or worse, promise to send lists but don’t, will have moments of epiphany and I’ll have more listings from a few more publishers next month.) For the fiction and non-fiction lists of Harper Collins India, Penguin, Bloomsbury, Westland, Aleph and a few others, please see previous issues of the newsletter here, here and here.
Zubaan Books
Centrepiece: Women’s Writing and Art from Northeast India
Edited by Parismita Singh
Fiction, art
Twenty-one women from across the northeastern states of India reflect on the personal nature and meanings of work through their own words and pictures. Whether they are brewing beer, carrying cow dung on their heads, or selling food in the streets, these women confront, love, reject, and laugh at their men in myriad ways. From Centrepiece, by Ayangbe Mannen:
Tara Books
Beasts of India
Kanchana Arni, Gita Wolf with various artists
Fiction, art
Here are India’s best-known beasts rendered by a variety of folk and tribal artists. This handmade book is a new updated version of Tara Books’ out of print classic Beasts of India.
Speaking to An Elephant and other Tales from the Kadars
Manish Chandi, Madhuri Ramesh and Matthew Frame
Fiction, art
The Kadars are a small indigenous community in South India. Originally narrated to the authors by Kadar elders, these stories recall ways of living in forest habitats that hold important lessons for all those interested in regrowing our forests.
The Barber’s Dilemma & Other Stories from Manmaru Street
Koki Oguma
Zany artist Koki Oguma loves to wander around his neighbourhood in Tokyo, watching people go about their business. Includes a conversation with a beard. How can you resist?
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Dear Reader will be back next week, with more new books and more nattering. Thanks for reading.