Old Babes in the Wood + Turn Every Page + More

I have friends coming over in about an hour, which you’d think is an indication that this is the wrong time to start writing — especially since this is the first time I’m newsletter-ing in 2023. Happy 2023, by the way. There’s still enough of the year left for that salutation to pass for relevant — but here I am. So here we go.

You know how fairy tales in English traditionally start with “Once upon a time”? I realised the other day that I can’t think of an equivalent phrase like that in either Bengali or Hindi. I don’t mean that we can’t translate “once upon a time” into Bengali or Hindi (of course we can), but for instance, apparently the tradition Kazakh opening for legends is “A long, long time ago, when goats head feathers…”. Korean legends allegedly open with “Back when tigers used to smoke tobacco” and in Somali, the phrase is, “Story, story, a story of silk.” I heard this on Instagram and have made exactly zero effort to verify the information because I love these so much. Goats with feathers, chain-smoking tigers, stories as resilient and beautiful as silk… yes please.

None of the short stories in Old Babes in the Wood open with such whimsy, though the collection isn’t short of fanciful flights from everyday reality. For example, there’s a storytelling octopus-esque alien in one and the spirit of a snail finds itself trapped in a woman’s body in another. Still, no matter how playful Margaret Atwood may be in her writing, there’s a crystalline glint of dark menace in her stories. Something saturnine lurks underneath the absurdity and you can never take her unseriously. This is, of course, not a bad thing and Old Babes in the Wood is everything you expect from Atwood. There are twisted women, fiendishly clever flourishes, and passages that settle upon you like fish skin on burn wounds. The book sparkles with that wry, deadpan wit of hers and in many of the stories, you can practically hear her voice in the third-person narrator’s bits. (Did I mention I’ve chatted with Ms. Atwood? Why, yes I did. For one whole hour.)

Speaking as someone who has fangirled Atwood for almost 30 years, Our Lady of Savage Prescience and Electric Insight never disappoints. (The only time I found myself saying “Oh Margaret” regretfully was when she was among the intellectual heavyweights who signed an open letter that protested public shaming and ‘cancel culture’. The latter is not a thing and the former is sometimes the only recourse one has. We can argue about this on some other occasion if you disagree.) However, the problem with being consistently brilliant like Atwood is that my standards for her are high. For instance, I’m among those who crinkled her nose at The Testaments — not because it was bad, but because it didn’t feel revelatory. The very least an Atwood novel can do is blow my mind and I will settle for nothing less.

Old Babes in the Wood has some previously-published short stories and some new ones. Atwood lays out trail of breadcrumbs into the mind of someone grieving, of someone trying to understand the past while grappling with the present; and even if you’ve never known loss, I suspect you’ll find yourself stopping to catch your breath at the way she writes about the everyday, showing how it contains traces of those who are no longer with us. The bottle of marmalade, the fact of a sky full of stars, the ambush of a box of tools that belonged to someone else, the unspoken questions in the papers left behind — unremarkable, forgettable little mysteries that keep someone not-alive-but-also-not-dead. I loved the way she wrote Tig, who has dementia, using a device as simple as sentences with words missing. To come up with a device that works so beautifully and to use it as sparingly as she does is a great example of Atwood at her best. Every word and every line is deployed with pointed grace and without a hint of indulgence.

Initially, I’ve got to admit, my mind was not feeling blown even though Atwood is masterful as a writer of short stories. Then came the last section of the book, with vignettes that draw upon the reality of Atwood losing her partner Graeme Gibson, who was diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2017 and passed away in 2019. Reader, Atwood left me destroyed and yet comforted. One of the fragments that’s lingered in my memory comes at the end of “A Dusty Lunch” in which one character (Nell) is trying to piece together her father in-law’s past. Try as she might, she can’t, despite having access to historical records of that bygone era as well as his own writings from that time. Admitting defeat, Atwood as Nell writes,

“I should give up. I’m the wrong person, Nell thinks. The wrong reader for you. I’m sorry. All I can say is: I hear you. Or I hear something. Or I’m trying to hear something. Yes?”

As I closed Old Babes in the Wood, it struck me that I think I’ve been the wrong reader for so many things I’ve read. A lot of the times, I haven’t understood what I’m reading or I seem to have got the wrong end of the literary stick. But like Nell, I’m trying to hear something. Yes.

And that’ll do.

Also in the pile of read books are Victory City by Salman Rushdie (which begins beautifully and then collapses into something hasty, erratic, cocksure and gimmicky. Thoroughly dissatisfying) and the five volumes of Kalki Krishnamurthy’s Ponniyin Selvan. Although the translation I read was (at best) awkward, what a fabulous world and what amazing characters! Mani Ratnam did an impressive job adapting the first three-odd books into his film Ponniyin Selvan -1, but the sequel was frustratingly inept. Most people loved it — in this case, I was the wrong viewer, instead of the wrong reader — and maybe if I hadn’t read the books, I wouldn’t feel as grumpy about it, but I did and I am.

The film gets about 5% of what’s in the books, and even that isn’t done as well as I’d have hoped, especially since this adaptation is something Mani Ratnam has been working on and dreaming of for decades. If he’d simply erased all the women except Nandini from the story to make it all about boys becoming (heroic) men, it would have been bad, but what Ponniyin Selvan -2 does is worse. The film cares only about the men (mostly Aditha Karikalan) and reduces Poonguzhali, Vanathi and Oomai Rani to irrelevant details. The women exist only to embellish a frame. All that matters is how beautiful the actresses are, not the characters they play. (I’d call them “roles” if they had roles.) If a woman has a speaking part in Ponniyin Selvan -2, it’s to service the male character in the scene by setting the stage for him to come across as either awesome or tortured. That’s practically all of Kundavai’s scenes in the second film, which is frustrating because the first film shows Mani Ratnam and his writing team can do so much better. The point at which Nandini does not get to cut Pazhuvettaraiyar down to size with a monologue and instead dies by suicide in Ponniyin Selvan -2 — sharp contrast to the dignified exit Kalki gives her in the books — marks the film’s final descent into contrived nonsense. Not that I loved the earlier sections, but they were still more bearable than the film’s final 45-ish minutes.

If you liked the films or if you like historical fiction, please find yourself a copy of the Ponniyin Selvan books. I believe there’s a new translation, which I haven’t read but even a clumsy translation (like the one I have read) will reward you with a story that’s so much richer and juicier than what we’ve got in the films. For those of you who don’t trust themselves to wade through five volumes, read The Grand Anicut, which I wrote about here (scroll down. It’s there somewhere). It’s basically Ponniyin Selvan Lite.

Before I leave, let me point you in the direction of Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. If you’re in India, it costs Rs. 150 to rent and that’s the best use of Rs. 150 I’ve made in years. You wouldn’t think a documentary about two old, white men could be so utterly charming, but it is. Caro is a revered biographer, famous for his books on Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. Gottlieb is, as one of the talking heads in this film puts it, “the Dumbledore of publishing” and a former editor of The New Yorker. The two men are very different. Caro wears suits and ties, his hair is neatly combed, and his demeanour is formal. Gottlieb shuffles around wearing sweat pants and hastily-buttoned shirt. He’s also full of quotable quotes (“Anyone can be adorable, but not everyone can be industrious, with results.”). Caro and Gottlieb, both in their 90s, have known each other for more than half a century. To quote the film, “50 years, five books, 4,888 pages, and they’re not finished yet.”

Caro is working on the final volume of his Johnson biography and Gottlieb is editing it. “He does the work. I do the cleanup. And then we fight,” said Gottlieb of their process. Among the things they fight over are commas and semicolons. “I too think a semicolon is worth fighting a civil war about,” Gottlieb said, while talking about what he and Caro have in common.

When Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie Gottlieb, suggested a film to document the two men’s relationship, both of them said no. The relationship of a writer and editor is too private for anyone else to see, they said. Eventually, they relented, but Caro had a condition: He would not be interviewed if Gottlieb is in the room. And so, for the bulk of Turn Every Page, Caro and Gottlieb are in different places, each of them occupying the frame as solo figures. They talk about the past, look for yellow pencils in the present, and tell you about their love for books and stories. Like a romance done right, we finally see them together in the film’s final scene (which has no sound because they don’t want you hearing what they say to one another).

(Left to right: Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb.)

I just kept nodding like a demented Noddy at pretty much everything Gottlieb said because the way he sees the work of an editor is exactly how I see it too. (The minor difference between us being I haven’t edited the likes of Toni Morrison.) Also, not that this is an important detail, but our man Caro was quite the hottie when he was young.

If you’re a bookish nerd, Turn Every Page is for you.

And with that, I will sign off. To all of you who have written or prodded me about the newsletter, and to those of you who subscribed despite my not having sent out a newsletter in four months, I do solemnly swear to write more often.

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