The Old Woman With the Knife + After Sappho + more

Earlier this month — it’s still November when I’m typing this. The last day and last hour of November perhaps, but still November — I was roaming around the National Centre for Performing Arts (where the Tata Literature Live! fest was being held for the first time since 2020) when I overheard a glorious exchange. 

“Ya sure, but I read Funeral Nights and that’s like 1,000 pages, so that counts for at least three books,” said one person. 
Whoever they were speaking to didn’t agree. “A book is a book,” they said. “Anyway, how much of it do you remember?”    
“Why do I have to remember anything? I’m reading for fun! Not for an exam.”
“No one reads thousand-paged book titled ‘Funeral Nights’ for fun.”  

Sadly, I couldn’t dawdle around them longer so I’m not sure what happened to their disagreement, but I’ve got to concede that speaker number two has a point. You wouldn’t pick up Funeral Nights for fun. Even though the tome does have its humorous bits, it’s not interested in being entertaining or even engaging. All Funeral Nights is interested in is creating a cultural record and consequently, it’s a book that is keenly aware of its own cultural value. Filled with folk tales, descriptions of traditions and rituals, and history, Funeral Nights is a novel only in name. It’s more anthropological than it is literary. The tales in the book have been written down not because they’re entertaining, but because they’re being forgotten. If you’re not interested in folklore in general or the cultural history of Meghalaya in particular, why would you pick up that book? Then again, why does anyone pick up any book?  

Speaking for myself, this month, some of the reading I did was basically done with the same energy with which I did homework as a kid. I read Citizen Gallery by Jerry Pinto and Gutter Child by Jael Richardson because I was going to speak to the authors about the two books at two different lit fests. I started Tomb of Sand because it’s the first novel translated from an Indian language to win the International Booker Prize. Then I set it aside because it was struggling to hold my attention. This could be because my brain can’t handle long books at this precise point in time. After all, Tomb of Sand has won awards and the International Booker judges described it as “enormously engaging”. (The enormous part, I can confirm.) Yet the book lost me within the first 100 pages. Especially when it comes to big, fat books, the connection with the reader is all about timing. Big books need to find readers at a point when they’re ready for commitment. At the moment, it seems like Tomb of Sand and I are not meant to be. 

However, I had a great time with The Old Woman With the Knife by Gu Byeong-mo and translated from Korean by Chi-young Kim. The protagonist of Gu’s novel is an ageing assassin who is on the verge of retirement. The agency she founded still gives her the occasional assignment, but she knows she’s too old for her job. Her plans of quietly stepping away from her profession go for a toss when she realises that a colleague of hers nurses a grudge against her. The Old Woman With the Knife is a proper page-turner and I can totally imagine someone like Michelle Yeoh or Rekha starring in a film version of this story. Gu’s packed a lot into her novel, giving her elderly protagonist moments of tenderness, a hint of a love story, and many killer action sequences. I almost finished the book in one sitting, which is exactly as compelling as a paperback thriller should feel. After giving the reader multiple adrenaline rushes through some elaborately-staged action scenes, the novel ends with a manicure, which sounds ridiculously dainty considering all the blood spatter in the rest of the book. However, Gu sets up the manicure as though it’s an act of bravery, both for the one getting it and the one providing the service. It’s a little bit of beauty in everyday life, a detail that stands out as distinctive and different; and unexpectedly, the manicure brings out the best in everyone. Superb ending.

(Fragment of a poem by Sappho.)

Speaking of beauty, After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz was an utter joy to read, mostly because Schwartz’s language is just so gorgeous. Practically every sentence feels poetic in the best possible way — “Her mind was a tangle of lyric odes and unconjugated verbs”; “… we had never won our lives by law, she said, only by literature”; “Perhaps Elektra suffered in verbs no one understood because there was not a future for the mood she lived in”; “It was time for women to write into being what they wanted to become”. This lyricism isn’t just for the heck of it. It’s about a tribe of women who see Sappho as their matriarch and messiah, so the poetic quality feels almost necessary. After Sappho reimagines the lives of a few famous queer women and Schwartz moves from one woman’s life to another’s with the elegance of a skipping stone. All the women are historical but the details of their lives are often imagined, and Schwartz puts these varying strands together together to create a delicate and sophisticated tapestry. After Sappho is perhaps best described by Schwartz herself: “These biographies would bring forth moments of becoming that lasted for centuries; there would be more than one life unfurling in every life. The lives would not break off on the page just when we had fallen in love” — a reference to how Sappho’s poetry has survived only in tantalising fragments — “and in each chapter, Sappho might become a different one of us.” In the last few chapters, Schwartz struggles to conclude her love letter to the women of the past and the novel feels a little directionless. Still, despite its flaws, After Sappho is a truly beautiful read.   

Thanks to a photographer friend, I discovered an extraordinary photobook: Marvel by Marvel Harris.

The front cover shows a blurry face that’s distinctly child-like. In no way does it prepare you for the depth of sadness and pain that’s contained in Marvel’s pages. The book is a documentation of five years in Harris’s life, focusing particularly on his struggles with mental illness and gender identity as he transitioned. The photographs — all black and white, all self-portraits — are devastating both for their candour and the beauty. I don’t know how Harris shot himself in those moments of vulnerability or how he managed to make sure each photograph is technically on point even as it radiates the difficult emotions Harris was grappling with at the time. As his body is moulded into what feels natural and relatable to Harris, the scars that glistened rawly at first, start sinking into his skin and eventually look benign. He smiles more, he looks into the camera instead of looking away or shutting his eyes. By the end of the book, he’s revelling in his body’s undeniable masculinity. The back cover is a photograph that highlights the elegant lines of Harris’s beck and shoulder. His face is looking away, as though looking back at the crying child in the front cover. It’s heartbreaking and soul-restoring all at the same time.

Usually, self-portraits give the viewer a sense of how a photographer wants to see themselves. They’re often projections of sorts. In his self-portraits, Harris strips himself down (literally) and shows you how he was seeing himself — his scars, the wrongness of his body, the agony, the awkwardness, the joy. Harris has written long captions for the photos towards the end of the book and they show he’s as good a writer as he is a photographer. But his photographs don’t really need captions. Marvel is a masterpiece of storytelling.  

Finally, of all the romances that I tore through this month, my favourite was The Ex Talk by Rachel Lynn Solomon, in which the two protagonists are journalists who work for American public radio. Very funny in parts and generally satisfying.

So that’s been November. We’re almost at the end of the year, which inevitably feels like a time to look back, take stock and berate yourself for not having done more. (Or maybe that’s just me?) It’s also a great time to get some reading and book-buying done as you resolve to do things differently next year. I hope you find yourself surrounded by stories that give you all those intangible little things that you didn’t know you needed. After all, isn’t that why we read books? Because for a little snippet of time, they complete us and set the world right.  

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