Solitude & Company + Untold Night and Day + The Line Tender + Caste

A sandwich of real, surreal, fact and fiction to end the year.

As we inch closer to 2021, please take a moment to thank Numa Pompilius, ruler of Rome between 715 and 673 BCE. We don’t know much about Numa, but we do know that he tried his damnedest to wiggle out of accepting kingship, but ended up to be a good ruler. Under him, Rome saw a period of stability, peace and new year’s day on January 1. We don’t know why Numa chose January to start the year. He may have chosen the month because he figured a party in the middle of dreary European winters is a good way to lift spirits. Or maybe Numa went with January because it’s associated with Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings, doorways, passages and other things. Janus would disappear from public memory, but the idea of January 1 as new year’s day persisted, with first Julius Caesar and then Pope Gregory XIII sticking with Numa’s program while devising their versions of calendars (Pope Gregory’s Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582, is the one we all follow). Which is why, come December, for no logical reason, we start looking back at the year past.

Thanks to this newsletter, I know that I’ve read on average one book per week in 2020 and I’ve shared with you what I thought about most of them. To everyone who has read and subscribed to the newsletter, thank you. This year, reading has felt a bit like this: 

…with real life behaving much like the dog.

Writing this newsletter felt vaguely therapeutic this year. It could have felt more like me screaming into a void, but it didn’t because you gave me your attention and your time. For this, I’m very grateful. 

December turned out to be a month of mostly grim reading. I finally finished Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents. Wilkerson, who describes herself as a Black Dalit, argues that one’s race is their caste in America — an identity that is inherited and enforced using tools like terror, endogamy and dehumanisation. 

Caste is rich with anecdotes, histories and Wilkerson’s personal experiences. Given the title, it should come as no surprise that India features prominently in the book. Some of the episodes Wilkerson recounts are unsettling, many are depressing and few offer silver linings. There are sections on the oppression of Dalits in India as well as a comparison of Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews with that of Black slaves in America. Wilkerson’s argument is very persuasive, but maybe there’s a distinction to be made between wanting to exterminate a community (as Nazi Germany wanted to do with Jews) and wanting to exploit a community (as the white establishment and Hindu upper castes have done with Black people and Bahujan communities respectively). 

Perhaps most chilling is Wilkerson’s prophecy that non-Black communities of colour — like Latinx and Asians — will align themselves with the dominant white caste, rather than joining ranks with Black people, in the hope of empowerment and climbing up the social pyramid. The data from the recent American elections, showing how immigrant neighbourhoods shifted to the Right, adds weight to Wilkerson’s theory.

As you may have guessed, this is not exactly light reading and despite Wilkerson’s excellent writing, it took me months to finish Caste because I kept setting it aside and wandering into fiction instead. Even though it is written for an American reader, I would say Caste is worth an Indian reader’s time because Wilkerson makes you think about the different and subtle ways by which caste and casteism can be articulated and enforced. That said, to understand caste, Indian readers would perhaps do better by reading authors like Meena Kandasamy and Sujatha Gidla; books like Moustache and Poonachi; and going through the lists of indie publishers like Panther’s Paw, Navayana, LeftWord Books, and Women Unlimited. If you’re Indian and from a Hindu upper caste background (like me), it’s up to you to educate yourself and understand what a privilege it is to be able to choose whether or not you’ll acquaint yourself with caste and casteist biases. Dalits don’t get that choice.   

Another book that took me a while to finish is The Line Tender by Kate Allen. Technically for young adults, The Line Tender is the story of Lucy Everhart, who loses two people she loves to freak accidents. Grappling with tidal waves of grief, Lucy works on a project that brings together everything and everyone she loves — while leaving you the reader an emotional, teary blob. My summary of the novel is vague because I hope you’ll read the book and I don’t want to spoil it for those who do pick it up. It’s not technically a perfect novel — a lot of it is, arguably, predictable — but it is moving and beautifully written. 

The Line Tender is told from the perspective of 12-year-old Lucy and Allen’s writing style has the direct simplicity of a child’s thinking. Her sentences are minimalist — for example: “My grief for her was like a circle. I always came around to missing her again.” — and they elegantly convey both Lucy’s youth and the numb desperation with which Lucy tries to keep herself from falling apart. I thought I’d finish The Line Tender in a couple of days because kids’ books are generally easy-breezy reads. Two weeks later, I was still lingering over it. Lucy’s numb sadness slipped off the pages and climbed inside me, leaving me heartbroken for this fictional little girl. Yet I couldn’t leave the book unread because that would mean I’d miss her eventual recovery. Because you know Lucy will recover. Not because this is a book for young people, but because that’s how life works. No matter how broken you may be, eventually and inevitably, you heal. You may not heal completely, but you gather yourself enough to carry on. In Lucy’s case, she does a lot more than just carry on. 

In case you were curious, the cover of The Line Tender is by artist Xingye Jin. You can see more of Jin’s fantastic illustrations here.    

One of Jin’s pieces reminded me of Untold Night and Day by South Korean writer Bae Suah (translated by Deborah Smith). 

Untold Night and Day is much darker than Jin’s illustration (I mean this literally. Much of it takes place at night and shadowy places), but this dreamy, surreal bus somehow reminded me of the bus rides in Bae’s novel. 

It’s difficult to describe Untold Night and Day. At a superficial level, it follows an actress named Ayami over a day and night after the theatre she was working at, is closed down. Through her, we meet her former boss, a visiting poet, and other people who have a strange, subtle connection to the theatre. This narrative is disrupted repeatedly by surreal elements, like a radio broadcast that only Ayami can hear. Time seems to loop because Bae uses repetition to disorient the reader. Phrases recur and characters reappear in different contexts. You recognise them and yet at the same time, they feel unfamiliar because Bae’s tweaked a detail. In the middle of all this is a blackout; there are references to an eerie Iranian novella titled The Blind Owl; poets disappear and disoriented visitors land in Seoul; a blind woman wearing hemp sandals and the Korean traditional dress, a hanbok, shows up again and again. What does all this mean? Your guess is as good as mine. 

Untold Night and Day is a slippery, strange novel and I imagine it would be very frustrating for those who like clarity and direct answers to the questions a story raises. I was mesmerised by its weirdness and the shimmering beauty of the language in Smith’s translation. Among the ideas explored in this slim but dense novel are death, endings and the way art can remake memories, people and stories. For example, the theatre shuts down, but the space reopens as a gallery that is showing an exhibition of photographs taken by poets. The actress we know as Ayami, when seen by another character, becomes a woman poet. A novelist transcribes Ayami’s dream and in the process, turns it into fiction. Everything in Untold Night and Day is in flux. 

Bae writes at one point: 

“People end up losing one another before they know it. Everything disappears as quickly as it's put up. The same is true of memories. It can even happen that, if you take ten steps out of your door then turn and look back, the house you just left isn't there any more. And then you'll never find it again. It can happen with people, too. This city's hidden name is ‘secret’.” 

By the end of Untold Night and Day, I felt like I’d spent all that time in Ayami’s head, roaming around her haunted, shape-shifting city.  

Someone who probably would have loved Bae’s fever dream of a novel is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who is remembered as a patchwork of memories in Solitude and Company, by Silvana Paternostro (translated by Edith Grossman, who I think did some of the best translations of Marquez’s work). Paternostro’s biography has a fabulous subtitle: “the life of Gabriel Garcia Marquez told with help from his friends, family, fans, arguers, fellow pranksters, drunks, and a few respectable souls”. How can you resist? 

Solitude and Company is an oral history written for Marquez’s fans. Paternostro started working on what was supposed to be a 2000-word article on the Colombian novelist, but that piece was never published. Instead, it became this cheerful cacophony of a book, which is a testimony to Paternostro’s impressive editing skills. If you haven’t read Marquez but are curious about him, Paternostro’s book would be an excellent companion piece to a more conventional biography, like Gerald Martin’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life.  

Solitude and Company is made up of selected excerpts from Paternostro’s interviews, strung together, like beads on a necklace, to tell the story of Marquez’s life. It’s an oral history with no commentary or framing narrative. Paternostro leaves it to the reader to figure out the speaker’s relationship with Marquez and their connections to other people quoted in the book. This sounds like an impossible challenge, but because of how cleverly Paternostro has selected and arranged the fragments, it’s surprisingly easy to do. For Marquez fans, Solitude and Company is a joy to read, with the author’s old friends talking about Marquez’s superstitions (he was petrified of ghosts); the mad show that the gigantic Colombian contingent put up in Stockholm when Marquez received the Nobel prize for literature; multiple explanations for the infamous fisticuffs with Mario Vargas Llosa; and more.

Sometimes the speakers contradict each other and other times, one continues another’s story. Within a few pages, the book feels as chaotic and heady as a real-life reunion in one of the watering holes that Marquez and his friends used to frequent as young men. By the end of the book, you have not just an overview of Marquez’s life, but also the socio-political contexts that impacted him, and the way he and his writing influenced others. 

I’m very glad I’ve got to end the year with Marquez and his drunkard friends, thanks to Paternostro (and my father, who found the book god knows where). The memories and stories of Marquez, as compiled and memorialised by Paternostro, are a wonderful reminder that for all the curveballs that the universe may throw in our direction, we choose what we will carry of the past into the present. And because of this, in some small way, we choose what we will make of the future. 

So that’s it from me and that’s also it for 2020. I hope you’ve stocked up on comfort food and when the clock strikes midnight on December 31, raise a toast to yourself. It’s been one helluva year and you’ve found ways to cope with all that it has thrown at you. Here’s to a happier and healthier 2021.

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