Until August + All Fours + more

Gasp! The newsletter lives!

As if it wasn’t bad enough that I’ve been very (ahem) irregular with this newsletter, people keep signing up for it. Which means each time I get an email notifying me of a new subscriber, embarrassment verily twangs within me and I sternly tell myself to just sit down and write the newsletter… tomorrow. I am declaring “tomorrow” to be now even though I’m at work and technically should be writing about season two of We Are Ladyparts (fantastic show. Highly recommend). Instead, I’m going to catch you up on what I’ve been reading. Chances are this newsletter will be more haphazard than ever because I’m going to be distracted by the work conversations swirling around me. So far, these have included the fact that you can actually watch tomorrow’s announcement of the results of India’s general elections in a movie theatre (price of ticket: Rs. 99) and how to write the word “sex” without writing said word on Instagram (answer: seggs, s*x, s3x. At this point, I put on my headphones). 

(For the two people who subscribed this morning, this is mostly your fault. I apologise in advance.)  

The past couple of months have seen more re-reads than normal. While on holiday, I carried with me Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle, which still feels fresh and unpredictable (the first book in the series, The Wizard of Earthsea, came out in 1968. Take that for longevity). To prepare for season three of Bridgerton, I went back to Romancing Mr. Bridgerton, which I remembered as the best of what I’d read from this series by Julia Quinn. The book is so bland and mediocre compared to what Shondaland has done with its adaptation that I found myself cracking my knuckles on my head like a Punjabi aunty while watching Nicola Coughlan and gang. 

Maybe not the most appropriate reaction to the carriage scene, but I’m standing by it. #ProudlyAunty

I also ended up re-reading parts of The Enchantress of Florence and The Ground Beneath Her Feet after reading Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie. Not one of these three will count among my favourites from Rushdie’s long list of written works — there were just conveniently close at hand on one of the bookshelves at my parents’ — but the first two have many startlingly beautiful passages that reminded me why I was a proper Rushdie fan in my 20s. I’m not going to offer a critique of Knife because it feels graceless to cast a critic’s eye at what is so obviously a trauma response. This is a book written less for a reader and more for the author — and that’s fair enough. Especially when you’ve dragged yourself back from the door of death after seeing a scene from your nightmares manifest into reality and being stabbed multiple times. In a parallel universe, there’s an alt version of me that has written an essay on the genre of the confessional in the modern era, looking at Knife, Hanif Kureishi’s Substack, and Grazie Sophie Christie’s essay on journalling. In this universe, I’m distracted by a conversation about whether or not “Meet Joe Black” is a misleading title for the Brad Pitt film which is proof if we ever needed any that my bright idea of writing this newsletter at work was a terrible one. 

(I’m going to finish this at home.)

Where were we? Re-reads. From what I can remember, I think my only other re-read was Mansur by Vikramjit Ram, which is a novella that is at its best when it describes the petty politics among the artists in Emperor Jehangir’s court in Mughal India. I went back to this book after reading Loot by Tania James, which was a proper romp. It’s historical fiction that imagines a life for a young man named Abbas, who collaborates with a French clockmaker to make the infamous automaton, Tipu’s Tiger. The first parts are set in Tipu Sultan’s kingdom before the area fell to the East India Company. The second part of Loot is set in Europe and England, and includes a heist that deserves to be adapted into a streaming series like The Great. I can totally see Olivia Colman playing the widow Lady Selwyn who inherits Tipu’s Tiger and moonlights as a writer of erotica. Alia Bhatt would be perfect as the French-Indian Jehanne, who tries to con Lady Selwyn with a little help from Abbas. Dear Netflix, if you have to spend obscene amounts of money on a project, make it something like this instead of a second season of that mind-numbingly dull Heeramandi. Sigh. 

One of my best reads of these past two months was a book with no words. When the Sun Sets by Ogin Nayam is one of the most beautiful books I’ve seen and a dazzling example of how storytelling is about ideas rather than language. The book answers the question of what the sun does after it sets, and casts the sun as a woman. Off the top of my head, the only sun goddesses that I can think of are Shinto’s Amaterasu and Sol from Norse mythology. Most cultures have historically imagined the sun as virile and masculine gods of fertility. I love the number of questions that shimmer to the surface when you start thinking about why maleness has been linked to the sun and what changes when you imagine the sun as a woman. Nayam’s sun ties her hair, knits, reads, entertains a flurry of the cutest clouds you’ve ever seen, and picnics with the Rainbow. She’s a woman who works, one who cares for her own and depending upon your own experiences of either being a woman or seeing women, you’ll find yourself wondering about what’s going on in Sun’s head. 

I have spent hours staring at the way Nayam uses washes of colour, geometry and patterns that I presume are traditional to him (he’s from Arunachal Pradesh and I know nothing about that part of the country). One of my favourite double spreads in the book is the one in which Nayam shows the sleeping sun (dense black with just two slight, delicate dashes of yellow) on one page and her waking up to go back to work in the next (a colourful triptych that shows her putting on her work attire). Another shows a twilight meeting of Sun and Moon, who stands with a cluster of night-bright stars dressed in twinkly white. When the Sun Sets is one of those books that I would frame if it wasn’t for the sheer joy of being able to hold a work of art in one’s hands. 

Finally, two books that felt like crazy-mirror reflections of one another — Until August by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and All Fours by Miranda July. Both have as their protagonist a woman in her 40s who escapes her marriage and domestic life by retreating into a hotel room in a nondescript place. Both reflect aspects from the real lives of the writers who have created them. Both are haunted by dead women relatives — July’s protagonist has a grandmother and great aunt who threw themselves to their deaths; Marquez’s heroine has an annual ritual of laying flowers at her mother’s grave — and both women are undone by desire. In spite of all these resonances between the two, no reader will ever confuse them. 

Ana Magdalena of Until August is very much a woman character as imagined by a man, in a book that isn’t technically a first draft but reads like one. She often feels half-sketched, hovering like a wraith in a scene rather than a whole person. There are moments when the prose sparkles and Until August ends on a high, with Ana Magdalena breaking free of the past by embracing it. She realises that in some ways, she has been following in her mother’s footsteps and the book concludes with her determined to carry her mother with her (very literally) while also charting her own path.

Marquez wrote this book in his last years, before his mind completely succumbed to dementia, and I couldn’t help but wish he’d begun this novel sooner. Women characters have usually stood on the sidelines of Marquez’s fiction, but they’ve mostly been charismatic, vibrant and eccentric enough to rival his heroes. It would have been lovely to see how Marquez crafted a woman protagonist like Ana Magdalena, who definitely seems to have shards of Marquez’s own personality in her. 

In contrast, July is a writer in her prime and a woman writing another woman, composed of dreams and fragments that July was entrusted with by a whole sisterhood that she reached out to while writing All Fours. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel about a woman and her midlife crisis, which is as wry as it is emotional. By leaving her protagonist nameless, July almost encourages the reader to see July in this character who is moderately-famous for works across media (like July), resembles her physically, and has a husband and child (like July does). Then the author proceeds to push this woman to the edge of her tether and makes her ricochet from euphoria to depression. This is a ruthless novel in the way July lays bare her protagonist. With witty one-liners that chime in with the regularity of a metronome, the novel is richly self-aware and July’s protagonist yanks herself away from sentimentality at regular intervals. All Fours is funny, raw, and messy with emotions and bodily fluids. There’s sex, masturbation, infidelity, period blood, snot and of course, tears. There are breakdowns, panic attacks, hormonal storms and creative highs and (spoiler alert) an ending that is truly happy but doesn’t conform to the conventional idea of a happy ending by a long shot. (This is not a book for delicate sensibilities though. If graphic descriptions of sexual acts are not your thing, steer clear of All Fours.) And there’s dance, rapturous and sensual, seducing both July’s heroine and readers. If you were wondering what’s the point of the title, allow me: “Everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable, but it’s actually the most stable position. Like a table. It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.” 

Insightful as it is, while reading All Fours, I kept wondering if it is as hard to write a book that feels relatable to men as it is to write one that resonates with women. Because what about a woman who isn’t constantly whipped into a frothy confection by sexual desire? What about the woman who wants to change her tampon without her lover standing witness? What of the one who feels her fight-or-flight response kick in at the thought of baking cupcakes and cookies at home? With men getting to occupy the spotlight as well as the penumbra in fiction for so long, it seems almost easier to write a character that will feel generic but relatable to wide range of men. With women protagonists especially, it feels more difficult. There are not enough of them and the ones that exist are tasked with more of a burden than they should have to bear.

All Fours is about an urbane, creative woman who is my age, and I confess, just the basic fact of a protagonist who is 45 years old made me assume that I will find her relatable. I didn’t though. All Fours felt almost exotic to me — not necessarily unreal or stretching credibility, but there was no point at which I saw even a glimmer of myself in July’s heroine. I felt for her, delighted with her and worried for her, but at no point did the distance between me and the first-person narrator disappear. In fact, I didn’t really feel even a fleeting sense of oneness with any of the women in the book. This is not a criticism of All Fours because a) it’s good fun, and b) I’m certain that there are many women who will feel July found the perfect words for their feelings, experiences and maybe even their fantasies. The point is that we could do with more stories that take us deep into the hearts and minds of women. Give July’s protagonist from All Fours some company and make the world of fictional women a little more diverse than it is now.          

Which brings me past the 2,000-word mark, thus continuing this newsletter’s tradition of being ridiculously long. On the plus side, you’ve been spared paragraphs in which I bemoan the state of my nation and do the word-shaped equivalent of tearing my hair out while squinting my eyes to find silver linings in these wretched times. (Yes, for once, I edited this newsletter. That’s why a 3,500-word email has not landed in your inbox. You’re welcome.) Instead, I’ll leave you with screenshots from one of my favourite K-dramas from last year. 

Here’s to writing a story that we’ll want to tell, rather than forget. 

Take care, don’t lose hope and thank you for reading. 

Dear Reader will be back soon(ish).