Book Review: The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai

Title: The Artist of Disappearance
Author: Anita Desai
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 978-0-547-57745-6
Genre: Fiction, Novellas, Literary Fiction
Pages: 156
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

When Anita Desai writes, she creates magic. I have always held on to this belief and moreover also thought that she is one of the under-rated writers in her own country. She writes sparingly and the words sparkle long after the book is published. My tryst with Anita Desai took place when I was barely seventeen. I remember watching the movie In Custody – a Merchant-Ivory production and as the credits rolled at the start, I saw that it was based on a novel of the similar name by a novelist called Anita Desai. I read the book as I loved the film so much. The book did not disappoint me at all and from thereon I read almost everything this writer had to offer.

The Artist of Disappearance is her latest offering. It is a collection of three novellas and in every way as brilliant as her previous works. The Anita Desai Reader (and I do not mean this in the loose sense of the word) knows what to expect. The writing is not only clear but also has many layers to it and as each one unfolds, the others become more elusive. The prose is beautiful, the nuances are well taken care of and she tries not to involve technology in her writing.

This collection of novellas focuses primarily on preservation and change. Of how the characters resist it and some give in, to face the consequences of their choices. It speaks of objects and lives – the nature of the two and how inter-connected they are.

The first novella, “The Museum of Final Journeys” talks of an officer of the British Government sent to a backwater town for his training. He is approached by an old man (the caretaker) from the countryside who wants him to visit a house now turned to a museum of strange and beautiful items. The old man wants to get rid of the most valuable item, which will haunt the young government officer for years to come.

The second novella, “Translator, Translated” is a story of a seemingly quiet teacher whose interest lies primarily in Oriya, a little less known language and how she gets the opportunity to translate her favourite writer’s first book in English. Things go haywire when the author publishes her second book and the teacher takes it upon herself to connect the loose ends, with repercussions unknown.

The third and last novella in the collection, “The Artist of Disappearance” Ravi wants to live an unknown life – like a hermit in the forest. Suddenly his life is turned upside-down when a film crew wants to interview him. He doesn’t feel a part of the existence and disappears using his tact and mastery.

Each of the characters in these novellas wants to preserve – to not let go and life doesn’t give them that opportunity. Ms. Desai’s craft is at a height – she knows what she is doing and she nails it with her writing. Read her for the writing, for the plots she creates and for the sheer beauty of language.

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Book Review: Ether by Evgenia Citkowitz

Title: Ether: Seven Stories and a Novella
Author: Evgenia Citkowitz
Publisher: Picador
Genre: Short Stories, Novella, Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-312-56935-8
PP: 256 pages
Price: $15.00
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4/5

Ether is one book I would recommend to all and mainly because we all can relate to the search for “identity” – the need to be known, know our roots and identify with where we come from and where we want to go.

The stories and novella in this collection are zesty in the sense that while dealing with a serious topic, the author manages to add in humour to this collection. For me, this collection was beautifully dealt with. It makes the reader sit up and take notice. It also makes the reader analyze the meaning of “identity” and its value in his or her life.

The stories in this collection are riveting. They speak for themselves, without giving too much time and that’s what I loved about the writing. For instance, in “Sunday’s Child” – a middle-aged actress literally evicts a homeless woman from her garden. This for me was the best story in the entire collection, and that was because of conscience – the feeling it evokes and the questions it raises in this story is brilliantly put.

On the other hand, in “The Bachelor’s Table”, we meet a lawyer, who very conveniently takes advantage of an accounting mistake only to realize way after as to what he has done. The title story, “Ether” takes us into the mind of a writer who has a block and how he plagiarizes his own life.

The stories in this collection are unlike the others that I have read before. They touch the core of the soul and make you question events and situations you probably wouldn’t have earlier. For me the book was perfect, the stories were what they were meant to be – thought-provoking, providing the required eye for detail and most certainly the kind of stories you want to keep going back to once in a while.

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Book Review: Tomorrow Pamplona by Jan van Mersbergen

For a great foreign language  book to be known that well and widely acclaimed, is always dependent on the translator. Great translators do half the job of making the book great and that I say from experience. For me it is always important that the translator knows what he/she is doing with the book and Laura Watkinson knew what she was doing when she translated Tomorrow Pamplona, written beautifully by Jan van Mersbergen. I would love to thank the publisher – Meike Ziervogel for publishing this brilliant small piece of work.

Now to the book: Tomorrow Pamplona is a book about almost everything and more – it is about love, family, betrayal, and all this on a road to self-discovery. On the path to knowing what it means to be human and what does one do at the crossroads of one’s life? So the book is about a road-trip – a strange trip at that, which takes place between a professional boxer and a family man. Both want to escape their routine existence. Both want a better life, according to them. And in that elusiveness of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, they discover themselves and what they really want to be.

Why is the book titled Tomorrow Pamplona? Because both of them are going to the Pamplona Bull Run, with the nagging thought that they have to eventually get back home. That is the situation with most of us – the drab and dull lives that we lead. Tomorrow Pamplona is written with a lot of heart and soul and that is why readers all over can relate to the book and what it says. For me, Tomorrow Pampona was one of those books that make you want to reassess your life – the do’s and the do nots. The want and the yearning to escape and may be that is why the book will hit a note and resonate in our hearts and minds long after the book is done with.

 

Book Review: Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers

Title: Reflections in a Golden Eye
Author: Carson McCullers
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics
ISBN: 978-0-141-18445-6
PP: 125 pages
Price: Rs. 299
Genre: Novella, Literary Fiction
Source: Personal Copy
Rating: 5/5

I have always believed in reading big books. The bigger, the better I say and have always maintained that. Having said that, I am also partial to novellas and short novels as and when they come my way and off late they have been coming my way more so than I expected. Reflections in a Golden Eye is one such short gem that most people do not know about. Carson McCullers has always been and will in all probability always be famous for The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Ballad of the Sad Café, of course as they were brilliant books and pieces of magnificient literature, but this is no less. I picked this one up on a lark and I am glad that I did.

Carson McCullers had a knack of portraying the loneliness her characters felt. When I read her books, I am almost overwhelmed with sadness myself. The plot almost becomes secondary. It is the way she writes and describes the surroundings that almost make you skip a heartbeat and wonder how did she manage to churn out such brilliance. I for one am not surprised, considering she knew that she always wanted to be a writer and admitted it to one-time friend Truman Capote. And now to the book.

Reflections in a Golden Eye is set in the American Deep South, in a fort, during peace-time in an army camp. The story centers around six people, each battling with their own demons, each wanting love in it’s varied fractured forms, and each looking for salvation and finding none whatsoever. It concerns the relationships between five key figures – repressed and confused Captain Penderton, his unsatisfied flighty wife Leonora, who is having an affair with Major Langdon, whose wife Alison is suffering great mental and physical exhaustion. Outside of them is Private Williams, somewhat simple and quiet, but menacing. As with all of McCullers’ work it deals with the nuances of spiritual isolation, the ways in which we find ourselves completely alienated despite and because of our surroundings.

The novella is brutal in the refusal to soften these stark elements of the human psyche. Shockingly violent, in both actions and private thoughts. These lives are burdened with intense hatred for each other that it controls their entire spiritual beings disallowing them to fully comprehend themselves.

It is typical McCullers’ in that it is unspeakably bleak, and delves into the darkest emotions. Knowing of McCullers’ personal life, and her dedicating Reflections in a Golden Eye to Annemarie Schwarzenbach – who she was immensely attracted to, but who constantly rejected her advances – speaks volumes about where she is coming from, and relates to the concept which she would come to struggle with in her later work The Ballad of the Sad Café, the eternal disparity between the lover and the beloved. Reflections in a Golden Eye is a masterpiece according to me. A book that you should not miss reading. Once you are done reading the book, try watching the film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando. It will for sure knock the socks out of you.

Book Review: Shoplifting from American Apparel by Tao Lin

Title: Shoplifting from American Apparel
Author: Tao Lin
Publisher: Melville House Publishing
ISBN: 9781933633787
PP: 112 pages
Genre: Novella, Literary Fiction
Source: Personal Copy
Rating: 3/5

This novella is a slice of early 21st century life among middle class creative types in urban US. The characters live detached lives in which nothing much happens but everything is observed and worthy of comment. The main character is unable to judge his own reaction to things or his own emotional state. He tries to make connections with people, often making heroic attempts, but is largely frustrated by a mixture of the cultural environment and his own character.

It has a certain ring of truth to it, and I know people in the UK whose lives are not dissimilar to those described here. However the narrative drifts as much as the characters lives – presumably deliberately but I’m not sure it makes for compelling reading. I read on in the hope of more of the semi-nonsensical but realistic conversations that are the book’s strength. Perhaps this was the intention.

The weak structure would be forgivable in a book this brief if there were something beneath the surface to grasp at. Unfortunately I ended up feeling the author was as shallow as the culture that his characters battle against. They strive for morality of some sort, but in a consumerist way that undermines any thought of them really having a positive impact on the world. The author seems to buy into the ethical posturing that, for example, extends to constantly eating vegan organic food but not to wondering who picked the food and what they were paid. The thefts in the book pass by with an admirable lack of judgment but there is no indication of why an American Apparel t-shirt would be desirable in the first place. The final theft then is the denial of any substance to the reader.

This reads like a harsh review, perhaps because I had high expectations. I’d recommend the book to people interested in novelists trying to do something different, but not to someone who wanted a good read or an interesting insight into US culture. I’m afraid Kurt Vonnegut said it better and much more succinctly:

“Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.”

Book Review: Quilt by Nicholas Royle

Title: Quilt
Author: Nicholas Royle
Publisher: Myriad Editions
ISBN: 9780956251541
PP: 144 Pages
Genre: Literary Fiction, Novella
Price: £7.99
Source: Publisher
Rating: 4/5

From the very beginning of this book the reader embarks on a fictional journey that feels distinctly different from any they may have had before. Language in all its strangeness and beauty comes to the fore, whilst at the same time the very human story is movingly conveyed. The tale is about the profound nature of the everyday, about emotional events that every reader will experience at some time in their lives. But it is also funny and intellectual. It engages the reader’s thoughts, challenges them, calls for them to think about the very language they read and speak and inhabit. This is an inventive, risky piece of writing, which succeeds because of the way in which it combines flights of imagination with the sense of a powerful emotional reality.

I suppose Quilt qualifies loosely as a novel, in the sense that it has characters (really just the two), time more-or-less flows forward in linear fashion, and the author shows a grudging nod to such plot niceties as beginning, middle, and end. However, it’s also free-association stream-of-consciousness poesis, in which the writer gives full rein to his obvious infatuation with ontological wordplay.

The book starts out as a reasonably coherent if lyrical tale about a man dealing with his father’s demise, but quickly develops a Kafka-esque quality as the protagonist waxes weird on the philosophical and theological import of…wait for it…stingrays. As it happens, I have a thing for sharks and their compressed cousins myself, so was delighted by the professor’s unexpected dive into the philological murk of our subconscious substrate; however, crafty readers hoping for allusions to actual quilting will be much surprised, as mantuas are masked by mantas, and purls passed over for pearls.

The brief Afterword suggests some very interesting ways of thinking about fiction today, what it can do and what it might do. It also prompts a rethinking about Quilt itself.

Royle’s critical work is justly famous and has always had a kind of inventiveness more usually associated with literary writing. In Quilt he takes this creative energy to the level,as Helene Cixous comments on the back cover, of mythmaking. It’s an exciting development for English novel-readers.

Four stars, for reminding us that syntax is our servant, not master, and that words were created expressly to share thoughts, feelings and dreams which could not otherwise be communicated simply by pointing to rock, and grunting.

Book Review: Next World Novella by Matthias Politycki

Title: Next World Novella
Author: Matthias Politycki
Publisher: Peirene Press
PP: 138
ISBN: 9780956284037
Price: £8.99
Source: Publisher
Rating: 5/5

This latest publication from Peirene is a fascinating dissection of misunderstandings and failure to communicate that can lead to the failure of a marriage. But Hinrich Schepp doesn’t realise any of this until after the death of his beloved Doro, when it is too late.

`Being dead, he thought, means first and foremost that you can’t apologize, can’t forgive and be reconciled, there’s nothing left to be forgiven, only to be forgotten. Or rather, there’s nothing to be forgotten, only forgiven.’

It’s short, a novella rather than a novel, as implied in the title, but its 138 pages contain a depth of miscommunication and loss. The book begins after Doro has died, when Schepp discovers her sitting at an awkward angle in her chair, as if she had fallen asleep while editing the manuscript that lay on her desk. His sense of shock and disbelief as the realisation dawns is beautifully and sensitively described:

`I don’t understand, thought Schepp, understanding.

`It’s not true, Schepp decided.

`Everything will be all right again, Schepp assured himself, and at the same time he was overcome by the certainty that he was choking.

“At least say something,’ he whispered finally. `Just one word.”

The story is a mere snapshot, one day in the life of Schepp, an academic in an arcane field of ancient Chinese language. It is through Schepp’s recollections and the notes on the manuscript Doro was editing before she died that we experience the depth of feeling and misunderstandings, and how they had arisen. The details of pertinent points in their relationship are portrayed in detail such that there is no need for more, no need to know what happened during the intervening years, and it is exquisitely translated from the German, occasionally wry, occasionally with a light touch of humour. For instance, in the early days Schepp habitually took Doro a pot of green tea in her room at the university, .

So the story is told through his reading of the manuscript and Doro’s notes on it about the marriage and sometimes about the lives they lead. What I loved is the story within the story so to say. The man who has a crush on the waitress is her husband as she is editing the manuscript. As he reads Doro’s notes and corrections, he understands that she knew all about the things he thought he had kept secret.

At one and the same time he dissects the narrative of the putrefying corpse of a failed marriage and clinically examines the role of the writer and reader in making texts. He interweaves three story strands to explore where writing comes from and who makes and owns meanings. The uber- narrative of the unfolding of Hinrich Schepp’s and Doro’s disintegrating relationship is interrupted by a story Schepp wrote decades previously, before his marriage. It portrays a semi-erotic fantasy of unrequited lust, which is dramatically realised in more recent years, yet unrequited in real life, apparently. Politycki’s main protagonists interface only in writing and rewriting. Fact, fiction and memory seem ironically unstable. Doro, in the shifting course of events has moved from editing Schepp’s work to correcting it and ultimately rewriting and continuing the story, making it her story, her version.

Perhaps the authorial choice to provide two endings to the novella can be seen as an assertion of writerly authority. Yet again all we have are versions of events and some readers, disrupted and unsettled by what they may perceive as an intrusion of a second ending may choose to privilege ending number one. Of course, some readers will prefer the second ending’s less macabre implications and seek some readerly solace in a more fantastical return to the radiant beginning of Hinrich and Doro’s love. Before the rot set in.

Readers will not feel neutral at this point of the book. In the end, Politycki shows himself equally to be a reader’s writer. For what more could we wish for? A page-turning twister of a tale, playing with versions of reality, whilst its literary tentacles wrap us around in this fantastical and stylish twenty-first century exploration of nothing less than our own Momento Mori.

`Next World Novella’ is a great two hour read. And an even better two hour re-read.

And last but not least, I would like to celebrate Anthea Bell’s remarkable translation of this wry, poignant and very telling tale. I felt the intense pathos when two people in a marriage are not able to tell each of their feelings, when a marriage breaks apart due to it and changes forever.